During the past years, the evolution of mobile communication devices has been explosive. The mobile communication device is becoming an accessory that every person owns, irrespective of the country. The functionalities added to the mobile communication devices, as for example, camera, video, music player, personal digital assistant, map provider, text messaging, email, calendar, etc., have made these devices indispensable for many persons.
The large penetration of the mobile communication devices has made them a target for adding even more functionalities, which, in the example to be discussed next, can save lives. Some areas in the world are prone to natural disasters. Natural disasters like tsunamis, hurricanes, typhoons, earthquakes, etc. occur from time to time and lives may be lost when those living in these areas are not made aware about the imminent disasters.
There are certain specialized processes that are available to be implemented in these areas for informing the people living there about the imminent disasters. However, these solutions have certain limitations and therefore, the indication of a potential disaster may go unnoticed by people in those regions.
Also, there are other crisis situations in which mass information sharing for people living in certain areas is needed. For example, a given event may impact only a small geographical area and so, this event may not be relevant to users who are not within this small area or the users that are not traveling to this small area. Examples of such cases are car crashes, icy roads, etc., i.e., local events, in which the small geographical area may cover a few roads including the car crash.
There are some existing crisis information sharing services utilizing a Short Messaging Service (SMS), for instance, Tsunami SMS (see for example www.tsunamisms.com). Such services deliver short messages in the event of natural disasters to users that have subscribed to this specific service. FIG. 1 illustrates such a system 10 having a centralized network component 12 that communicates with mobile communication devices 14 via SMS messages 16.
A problem with SMS based warning systems is that they require use of centralized network components 12, which can become bottlenecks and introduce a single point of failure to the system. In other words, if such a centralized network component 12 fails for some reasons, the entire system fails to distribute the SMS messages to the subscribers. In addition, the SMS based warning systems also place a heavy load on the network because an SMS messages has to be sent individually to each user, i.e., a central point sends the same message N times to the N users. Further, SMS-based solutions do not work in peer-to-peer networks, such as Peer-to-Peer Session Initiation Protocol (P2PSIP) based person-to-person communication networks being standardized in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Furthermore, SMS messages have no priority in the physical network and the user may not often even notice the message when he or she is, for example, driving a car or talking on the phone as the users receive many SMS messages, most of which are unimportant.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide devices, systems and methods that avoid the afore-described problems and drawbacks.